The Emperor of All Maladies

WINNER OF THE GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD 2011

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2011

‘Profound, eloquent and searching’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘Essential reading’ INDEPENDENT

‘Masterly’ GUARDIAN

‘Extraordinary’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Riveting, audacious and now more urgent than ever in this vast update, The Emperor of All Maladies is a masterpiece.

The story of cancer is a human one – a tale of chance discoveries, seized opportunities and human endurance. From innovative early surgeries to the Curies’ ultimately tragic work with radiation; from Sidney Farber’s hugely risky discovery of chemotherapy to the author’s treatment of his own patients, The Emperor of All Maladies is a profound and revelatory portrait of an enigmatic disease humans have lived with, and perished from, for more than five thousand years.

In this updated edition of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s instant classic, four new chapters reveal what has changed in the universe of cancer in the years since the book was first published. With moving eloquence, he offers an insight into our evolving understanding of cancer’s causes and the emerging, revolutionary new treatments that might shape its future, including those that Mukherjee himself has helped devise.

‘This elegantly written overview allows us to look a once whispered-about illness squarely in the eye’ INDEPENDENT

‘The notion of "popular science" doesn't come close to describing this achievement. It is literature’ OBSERVER

About the author

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Song of the Cell, The Gene: An Intimate History and The Laws of Medicine. He is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, the University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School. In 2023, he was elected as a new member of the National Academy of Medicine. His work has been published in Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, among others.